The idea of universal basic income has been getting more and more popular in recent years – we saw it in Finland, Switzerland, France, and others. The basic concept: The state will give every citizen a small wage, just for being a citizen. No demands, no checks, no limits. The idea is that in an economy based more and more on luxuries and consumption, as our basic needs like food are produced more and more easily and efficiently with advancing technology, we must encourage people to consume. And directly giving money is more efficient than welfare systems and other types of government spending.

This idea has various supporting arguments and many of them are quite logical, various opposing arguments and many of them are also quite logical, and you can hear about all of those in various places on the Internet. I would like to talk about one issue that does not seem to be talked about often, at least I don’t remember ever seeing anyone raise it – the influence of such a model on the interdependence between government and citizens.

I don’t want to be all negative about universal basic income, because the problems it tries to solve (at least in its current form, and the main reason why it’s been coming back to the discussion recently) is a real problem that definitely requires a solution – the increasing unemployment, and the improving technology that increasingly allows satisfying all our basic needs with less and less human labor required. The unemployment crisis, currently hurting many developed countries, seems likely to only become worse, with some new technological developments that are going to make many more jobs unnecessary, most notably the autonomous car – millions of people are currently employed in driving (trucks, taxis, buses) and might all find themselves instantly out of work soon. And this is only the beginning. It’s hard to think about a single profession that good enough technology cannot replace within a few decades. And if machines provide all our needs, why should we try to artificially “invent” new jobs? The world of advertising and marketing is working hard to come up with new “needs” for us to justify creating more jobs. What if, instead of that, we just give up the idea of everyone having to work, and find some way to reward the few who work while the majority just lives on universal basic income, consuming what the machines produce?

That is a reasonable way of thinking, and the immediate criticism of “but then who will want to be the only people working” is reasonable and should be addressed, but is not necessarily impossible to solve. But as I said – I have a different question to ask.

For a little background, I want to look at the list of countries in the world whose economies are based on oil. The world bank provides us a nice list of countries in the world sorted by how much of their export products are fuels; In the list of countries with over 50% we can find, in this order: Iraq, Angola, Algeria, Brunei, Kuwait, Azerbaijan, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Kazakhstan, Russia, Oman, Norway, Colombia, Bolivia and Bahrain. Can you notice what almost all of those have in common?

Other than Norway which is really a special case, and possibly Colombia and Bolivia which are still democracies, however imperfect, all these countries are somewhere between authoritarian to complete dictatorships. Despite all the fuel export money that should seemingly help them develop and advance, almost all of them are at the bottom of nearly any reasonable measure of quality of life or quality of government. Is this a coincidence? Probably not, and this is an example of the famous “natural resource curse“. It has long been discussed in the past, and it seems quite likely that it’s a real factor in the development of these countries.

Where does this curse come from? The explanation seems so natural, that already Plato predicted it – in the days of classical Greece, when the main challenge for states was combat more than economic growth, he provided the following insight: States whose army is based on hoplites (elite infantry who came from the upper classes of society, mostly through the requirement that they finance the expensive armor and equipment for themselves, meaning poor people could not be included) would develop an oligarchic government; States whose army was based on warships (which in those days required a great number of rowers, a job which did not require much equipment or training, therefore was available for the lower classes) would develop democracy.

What am I getting at? It might sound cynical, but it certainly seems like this is how global politics work: People do not get rights because they deserve them, not even (at least not only) because they fight for them. People get their rights from the state because the state needs them. The hunter-gatherer societies before the agricultural revolution were completely egalitarian; and those were societies where every person provided their own sustenance, and was not dependent on anyone else. After the agricultural revolution, we start seeing differences – in fertile countries in Europe and the Mediterranean we see weak governments, collecting taxes from farmers who mostly provide for themselves. In the Middle East, America, or China, we see strong dictatorial states, managing giant irrigation projects that bring prosperity to the people, but also create a dependence of the people on the state rather than the state on the people; Diverting a river for irrigation of a dry area is not a project that can be managed by a small family farm. Which type of country more easily evolved to develop democracy and individual rights? It’s easy to guess. That was then, and the trend still goes on – countries where the common citizen’s participation in the economy is insignificant, such as in the oil exporting countries, are the same countries that show the worst records of citizen’s rights. The advanced and free countries are those that base their economy on taxing the citizens’ economic activity, as these are the countries that need their citizens; They have no choice but to keep them happy.

And that, in my view, is the undiscussed danger of universal basic income – it makes the citizens unnecessary for the state. It’s not for the few who have to work that I worry; I worry for those who will not work – maybe one or two generations of them will enjoy the free lunch, but eventually, what stops the state from turning into a corrupt entity that takes away their rights and exploits them, once they are fully dependent on it? Governments of modern countries in the developed world cannot afford facing a mutiny of, say, ten percent of their citizens over some problematic law, because those citizens are what gives the state the power to enforce its laws in the first place. But a theoretical country that finances itself with robot labor and gives the citizens universal basic income, in case the government decides to end democracy, what will the citizens do? Rebel? Let them rebel, the government will say. The robots or mercenaries can take care of them. In fact, why limit ourselves to theoretical countries? The modern Middle East provides perfect examples for this. What was the Arab Spring if not a sequence of rebellions of citizens against governments who have little or no need for them, and therefore had no problems crushing them with violence? If we want a future where our income comes free from the government, we better think very hard on how not to make ourselves unnecessary.

Lately, three trends have been becoming stronger and stronger in technological and political news; all three coming from different sources and representing different ideas, but in my opinion all three share a very important and fundamental characteristic – the loss of trust in the human mind, and in its capability of making decisions and managing its own life.

One trend is the increasing worry about the dangers of artificial intelligence research eventually creating a superintelligent being that makes humans obsolete. Of the three trends, this is the only one with which I don’t disagree in principle, only in some details, and I will write a separate post about that soon.

The second is the rising estimation of the power wielded by big Internet companies, especially Facebook and Google – estimation expressed both by their admirers, who describe their algorithms as some sort of magic powers, and even more by their critics, who describe them as some sort of dystopia coming to consume us. What hasn’t been said about them? They know everything about us. They can convince us of anything. They are omnipresent, we cannot escape them. See for example Tristan Harris’s appearance on Sam Harris’s podcast, or Tim Berners-Lee’s letter for the 28th birthday of the World Wide Web.

The third is the increasing tendency of intellectuals throughout the developed world to speak, either explicitly or in hints, against democracy. I don’t know if it can be said to have started there, but the UK brexit referendum and the election of Donald Trump as president of the USA have definitely opened the floodgates, with countless people complaining about the idea of “uneducated” people making important decisions by themselves. This includes some people I greatly appreciate and respect (most notably and unfortunately Richard Dawkins, for example).

All three add up to a fairly consistent future: Humans are primitive and unnecessary, and will eventually be replaced by something better. Now, don’t get me wrong – I’m definitely not an idealist who will speak poetically about the “majestic” nature of human thought. If it is true that humans are powerless against some algorithms stumbled upon by some Google engineers, we need to accept that and respond accordingly. But how true is that? My very strong impression is that people accept it as true without much scrutiny, and with very little will to fight for the future of their human brains. I suspect there’s something comforting for our current generations in thinking that they are powerless cogs in some machine that runs very well without them, releasing them of any responsibility.

Let’s look at Tristan Harris’s worries (sorry for picking on him; it’s because he’s the one giving the most rational, detailed claim about this that makes it possible to argue with, unlike the simple alarmism that constitutes most of this discourse). He talks about our instincts being “abused to control us“. About technology “hijacking our psychological vulnerabilities“. Why is that? because websites are getting better and better at using tricks to get our attention. He lists a series of methods, backed by psychological studies, that can be used to persuade people of things without them understanding how those work.

The problem is, there is nothing new about this. The idea that persuasion can be done not only by logical debate but also by mind tricks is thousands of years old, as are the complaints against it. Rhetorics have been considered a field of study at least since Aristotle, and I cannot see any way in which Facebook’s “manipulation” methods are any different than the ones described by him – the same techniques Harris describes can be used by a human just as well as by an algorithm, and the absurd thing is that Harris himself admits that, by comparing it to his own past occupation as a magician. In that sense, the idea that “manipulating” algorithms and “fake news” must be made to stop, or that they prove that democracy is unsustainable, becomes amazingly repetitive – it’s the same old anti-democratic argument raised against the first democracy in the world. The intellectuals offering these complaints are again playing the role of Plato or Aristotle complaining about the “sophists” who can convince the masses of everything, clarifying the need for the wise philosopher king to educate the masses in the true virtue. While that has always sounded good in theory, millennia have proven how wrong this kind of thinking is, and how democracy, despite its (very real) shortcomings, is still the best system to rule our societies.

And here is the advantage of understanding how old this problem actually is – we don’t need to invent new solutions. We can look at the old ones and see which works. How can we deal with sophists? Harris’s solution is to make a list of behavioural flaws we should demand them not to make; a reasonable thing to do, but hardly a solution. Just like we don’t expect every person we meet to adopt a series of demands we made from him just like that, so we should not expect it from every software company. Tim Berners-Lee’s suggestions of asking Google and Facebook to act as “gatekeepers” are even worse, when we think about it in this way – would we want to assign any company do decide who gets to talk to us and who doesn’t? This is basically the philosopher king coming back, in CEO form.

So what does work? For many centuries, the answer has been one of the most fundamental ideas of western political philosophy – the way to defeat bad ideas is not by outlawing them, but by debating them and suggesting good ideas instead. Few people argue with this philosophy in general, but it’s very easy to forget to apply it every time the bad idea puts on different clothing – in this case, we are supposed to believe that the fact these bad ideas come from algorithms rather than people somehow makes a difference. I’m still waiting to hear what that difference is. Advetisements have existed as long as capitalism has, and our society survived them. Now the advertisers have more information about us? So does a door-to-door salesman who sees where you live, what you look like, and how you speak as they try to convince you to buy some garbage. Harris is worried about studies showing you can trick people to eat 73% more soup. How much more soup can a sophist convince you to eat? How much soup can Tristan Harris the magician convince you to eat? I want to see those studies. If you don’t compare the algorithms’ persuasion power to a sophist’s persuasion power, you cannot say that the former deserves a different treatment than the latter.

So many people want us to think we’re powerless against a scary world – some tell us politics is too complicated so we should just stay in our little corner and let the experts do the thinking for us, and some tell us that advertisements are too clever so we need to close our eyes until the experts decide what we can be trusted to see. I say – if you’re going to say that human beings cannot handle an advertisement without being brainwashed, you’ll need some better evidence than what we have today. And if that’s not the case, I say let’s do something else – let’s take responsibility for our own minds and our own lives. Let’s learn more about our political systems and make better choices about them. Let’s learn more about the mind tricks used by advertisers so we won’t fall for them. A good place to start (other than Daniel Kahneman’s fantastic books), ironically, is Tristan Harris’s own essays – he gives a very nice description of some of those marketing tactics. I only wish it ended not with “If you want your Agency, you need to tell these companies that that’s what you want from them”; I wish it ended with “now you know what to watch out for; so let’s take some personal responsibility and think for ourselves”. Convincing you to buy a toaster or to vote for a candidate is a small victory for advertisers; Making you think you have no agency until you ask it from them – that’s a huge victory for them, and a loss for you.